[BtVS] The Inanna Complex, [1a]
[Previous Parts]
Give me back my broken night,
My mirrored room, my secret life.
It's lonely here,
There's no one left to torture.
-Leonard Cohen
Part 1: Scorpio RisingBreathe in. Good. Now, out.
It's not a naturally conscious decision. Ordinarily, her medulla oblongata takes care of all autonomic things like the rhythm of her heart, peristalsis, and rate of hair growth before her bi-weekly application of RWR14 un-magically transforms all semblance of mousy, blah chestnut into dynamic red. Her brain is the most advanced ROM unit Mother Nature has ever created, all the necessary functions programmed in from the get go, freeing the bigger parts to occupy themselves with other activities. Such as gazing out at the shattered landscape zipping by at 225, as the ghost reflected in her window brushes a stray lock back over her right ear.
No doubt about it, Daisy Fitch is a true multitasking unit.
In. Out.
Still, focusing on breathing, controlling it, comforts her.
And at least, this way, she doesn’t have to think about the great big felony she's about to commit.
She imagins her diaphragm flattening like an accordion, the screaming little molecules of oxygen sucked in from the air, bouncing down her trachea like a waterslide, through her bronchial tubes, until they reach the little feathers of alveoli decorating the inside of her lungs. She focuses on her mental cartoon with pinpoint precision, wrapping herself in the image of her respiratory theme park.
Still, a little thumb (damn multitasking!) of worry presses into the middle of her brain like a permanent bad sector, and that part, instead of concentrating on her breathing mini-drama wonders if she's injected herself with enough muscle relaxant.
In. Out. (Ingredients. Yup.)
In. Out. (Necessaary supplies. Confirmed.)
In. Out. (Gotta pee.)
In. Out. (What if she gets caught and tossed out into the Lip with a ham sandwich and butter knife, forced to live out the remaining the fifteen seconds of her lifespan as demon hors d'oeuvres? Would it at least have mayo on it?)
In. Out. In. Out. In-
First order of business: stop hyperventilating. Otherwise she's going to pass out before even hitting Sunnydale.
Out, then. Hold.
Because the last thing she wants to do is disappoint the Goddess in her mind.
Oh dear. It sounds better when she doesn't quite put it that way.
After all, it started out innocently enough. In dreams. The whisper of a voice. A suggestion. Sometimes a nudge. Then, it began encroaching, in daydreams, idle thoughts, full consciousness.
And now Willow tells her she's the one. She's going to be famous. Promises she'll be witness to the most spectacular event ever since the whole Christ-on-the-third-day deal. Because Who'da really think of her, Daisy Fitch, as worthy of bearing Rosenberg's voice?
All she has to do is raise the dead.
Naturally, how can she say no to that?
Of course, she could very well just be insane, what with the hearing voices in her head and all. Wouldn’t it be funny? Yeah, it’d be nice to be insane, to chalk it all up to delusion, turn around and check herself into a Thorazine farm.
Because, otherwise? Scared shitless.
The Bullet lurches to a halt at Ventura 170th, final stop west. From there, the track dissolves into rubble and twisted strands of metal. On the east bank, a row of taxicabs stretch from end to end.
Taking a deep breath, Daisy steps out to the streets.
Ambitious is the last word Dante would use to describe himself. In fact, if you ask him, he'll admit to being the nobody blip, an embarrassing anomaly, the little acorn that couldn't, kicked and buried somewhere far away from the oak of his oversized family tree. He's supposed to be a builder; after all, it's in his genes. His father is an architect, one uncle, a civil engineer, and yet another, a security specialist. Their fathers before them had been builders as well. (His grandfather, however, had been an accountant, which might have been due to influence from his great-grandmother's side of the family.) Still, like the four generations of men in his family, it's almost a given fact.
Except for him.
But then again, he's no Xander Harris. He has no such ambitions. He can't fake any more interest in building the better engine or making giant people habitrails more impenetrable and imposing. No, there are no foundations and iron rebars and redesigning Frank Gehry's for him. He’s more Gen-X than Gen-17.
Instead, he drives a taxi.
Behind the wheel of his '27 300DT, fingers drum restlessly against the molded plastic steering wheel. One million plus miles and still going strong, burning vegetable oil, alcohol, diesel, whatever. The engine is on its third rebuild, the tranny, number five, but the classic Mercedes logo, pretty little decorative ornament, is still attached to the hood. It should have been retired a century ago because there are about a million cars that are a lot faster, all fiberglass and aluminum, thirty-eight-hundred horsepowered demons, but not the Tank. It's his baby, his pride and joy. And so what if he passenger seat's missing a few springs and tilts uncomfortably forward? If the power windows only work on his side or the left rear door is permanently stuck shut? Or that it takes twenty-two seconds for the Tank to go from zero to 140? Not every cab totes around two tons of ceraluminum armor either.
Other drivers got you where you need to go quick.
Dante Harris guarantees survival.
So, when the girl slides into the back seat of his ride, and says “Sunnydale High," in a nervous, but polite way, he only pushes the flag down with a nod and a grin.
Observing her through the rearview mirror, he notes she's cute. Very Willow. Which means she probably only wants to be your friend. Ah, well.
The glow-plug light flickers on. With a manly (as described by him) rumble, the engine turns over, and the car slowly pulls back and rolls away from the curb.
He walks softly, makes no footsteps, no sounds save a steady, metallic click, tapping lightly on the ground, a metronome edging closer. And he carries a big stick. His left leg is a half-inch shorter than the right, and with his weight leaning into the latter, he obviously favors it.
He strolls with deliberate, languid limps towards the group that includes, roughly a dozen vampires and their hired gun - some eight-foot mutated menagerie of assorted parts. Hooves for feet. Gorilla arms. Bat wings and a face that resembles the wrong end of a giant squid. Peering into the shadows, the hit-thing looks about as mortified as a creature without any discernable facial features or lips can appear.
"You gotta be shitting me," comes the burble. "Him. Cripple guy. He's the one killing allaya off?"
Feet shuffling. Embarassed mutters. One or two whiny protests. And the clicking comes closer, until Limpy stops and looks up into the waxy, misshapen blobular orifice of the Ezbekiyeh.
"So you're Angel," comes the grunt, as he takes in the serious, dark-haired vampire. "Huh. You're a lot smaller than I thought you'd be."
Angel glances around, unfazed, assessing his surroundings, and the vampires eyeing him with alternating fear and awe. "Well, I'd have to say you're a lot...no, you're pretty much every bit as ugly as I'd imagined."
There's a snort, wet and bubbly, of the snot-filled variety. "Big words from a little shrimp." Features stretch out to what might be considered a magnanimous smile. "Tell you what. I'll give you a head start, pop you from the back. You won't feel a thing." Then leans back to his cohorts, snickering. "Knew he was nothin' but a-"
From the end of the staff, a curved blade snaps out, red in the moonlight, and two swings later, faster than any of the thugs could anticipate, the Ezbekiyeh finds himself staring at his hooves and torso from the three neat pieces of him splattered on the ground.
He flips the blade and four heads separate from their shoulders, the microscopic line severing the spinal cord between the third and fourth cervical bones with surgical precision. Their bodies are dust before the heads hit the floor, courtesy of the blood-red blade.
Normally, blood is simply another impurity in a folded blade. The mixture of carbon, iron and calcium renders the steel brittle and susceptible to breaking. Unless, of course, you're a tengu. The forge of the naginata comes from a long tradition of demon weaponsmiths. It's strong because blood makes it stronger. And it's wicked sharp. He found that one out years ago when its former owner popped his left patella like a microwaved marshmallow.
The others, being natural-(re)born cowards, smartly enough, bail in all sorts of different directions. He chucks the naginata at the slowest one, pinning her through her heart, face-first against the side of a dilapidated building. Her squeals and struggles magnify as he limps painfully nearer. With a hand firmly against the back of her neck, he draws the blade out, the slurping sound echoed by her screams. Shoving the vamp to the ground, he lifts the blade.
And pauses.
This one strikes a strange frisson of familarity in him. Small. Blonde. Cute. Covered in blood. Reminds him of her.
Which is odd because he can't really picture her face anymore, can't resolve the fuzzy lines and colors. He hasn't dreamed about her in years, only remembers that a few decades past, one of her copies had stumbled into the Hyperion, hysterical and clawing at her head. Cellular imprinting. Compulsion. Something. Drawing her to that place.
His features harden. A flick of the wrist, and she scatters in the wind, along with the other debris floating about.
The girl. The copy. She'd muttered incoherently, gibbered and cried pitifully, and all he could do was cradle her in his arms, this blank and terrible creature, before she finally died. And yet. Still has trouble remembering. What she smelled like. How she felt. Her exact features, an unfocused blur.
There are too many holes, too much fuzz in his memories. He thinks he might just be getting old. A few centuries will do that do you.
Sometimes, though, he feels might have been a different creature altogether. Another man. Another vampire. Another lifetime.
Demon. The choice. Claws in his brain.
But that might just be wishful thinking.
He's smarter than the average undead. More tenacious. Centuries of experience and Slayer blood in his veins have helped him wage the endless battles on the rubbled streets in the Hellmouth.
Like the line of now-extinct Slayers, he's the last, the only one left of his kind. And like them, he knows, in the end, it's all futile, and that one day he'll slip, he'll be distracted, and then it'll all be over; all the overtime he's managed to buy for those he's promised to protect traded in for a pile of dust.
He knows he's going to fail. Tomorrow. Next week. Next year or decade or centiry. Inevitable, really. Because he failed so long ago. He loved. He obsessed. And because of that, he destroyed her. And he can never take it back, never make up for the damage he's caused, the path of carnage he's strewn everywhere he's gone. And he has no excuse. He's the monster, the murderer. Thief. Rapist.
Still, he fights on, driven with fanatical fury to protect whomever he can. Day by day. Forever and ever.
It's all he can do.
Sometimes she dreams. Other times, she has visions. For her though, they all merge into a thick, warm stew that often speaks, and less often screams. And when they scream, she does as well. Gibbering and clawing and crying, she wonders where he vanished to.
Spike? Spike? Where did her beautiful boy go? Sometimes, she thinks she sees him, but then it's Daddy. Daddy bending over, picking her up, comforting her, wrapping her arms. Daddy, who speaks to her with his sad, broken soul.
Riddles and vision, tiny broken pieces of crystal figurines and sparkly jewels and little girls' hearts. Evil, they whisper. Evil visions for evil girls. And, oh, how she's been evil.
"Do you dream?" she murmurs, humming tonelessly into the handset. "I see them, snakes and stars, shaking and stirring, drunken skies dropping souls. Drop, drop, drop..."
"Drusilla," Wesley Wyndham Price gently lifts the receiver from her grip. "I've told you. I'll answer the phone." Holding open the patio door, he gestures for her to follow him back into the Hyperion lobby.
"But the stars..." she pouts, her voice a petulant purr. "They still move about."
"And they'll be out again tomorrow, I promise."
"They told me a story tonight." She smiles, as if privy to some private joke. "A rhyme about daddy."
"What did they say?"
She turns to him, Drusilla, so very serious.
"Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn, apple seed and apple thorn;"
Without hesitation, he adds, "Wire, briar, limber lock, three geese in a flock," before giving her a rueful look. "I know the rest of the rhyme."
"Pretty, isn't it? A pretty rhyme for my pretty cuckoo."
She forgets sometimes, who she is, where she is, who she used to be.
Wesley's hand is still out, palm up, waiting. She pauses, cocking her head at the offering, as if inspecting some rare bird. Slowly, cellular memory returning, she rests her hand in his. It's cool, smooth, without temperature, like hers, and he smells of lightning and sulfur, thunderstorms underneath. As he leads her inside, a milky white film slicks over her eyes, and she turns back, tilting her head to glance once more at the black sky.
"One flew east, and one flew west...and Scorpio...Scorpio rises on the horizon."
Hallway after endless hallway. How the hell can one lousy high school have so many damn hallways? Festooned with ick in a variety of shades and colors, it smells worse than it looks and that says a lot; the manky stench of urine and decay and...pretzels...thick in the air, seventy-eight years of accumulated shit. Creepy shadows flicker from the gas lamp in her hands, making her jump at every encroaching shade, though realistically, it's probably been long abandoned by anything human. Or inhuman, for the matter. After all, even the most pathetic creatures of the night have minimal standards.
Through the tour of nightmarish corridors, down endless flights of steps, Daisy heroicially ploughs through the sights and smells and sticky, squishy things under her shoes that she doesn't even want to think about. No, far easier to listen to happy, chirpy voice in head and not think too much or else she'll run, screaming back down the halls, and probably pitch mug-down into something completely repulsive.
Here.
Finally.
Hello, giant manhole of evil.
Gingerly setting the lamp on the ground, Daisy carefully scratches out each leg of the pentacle into the dirt. In the middle, she places an antique dragonfly stove. When the gas pops to life, she sets a beaker down, sloshing chemicals and herbs together into a concoction that resembles nothing more than pink bubblegum, torquing the fuel line as the mixture bubble, bubbles and all that jazz
"By the Name which I was given on the Sphere of NEBO, I call to thee
Lady, Queen of Harlots and of Soldiers, I call to thee"
Words sound strange, stumbling from her tongue, as she mouths the incantation she'd practiced so hard for so long, she can practically recite it unconscious.
Lady, Mistress of Battle and of Love, I pray Thee, Remember
Deity of Men! Goddess of Women! Where thou gazest, the Dead live!"
Which is good for her, because as she pulls the final ingredient out - a strand of fine, blonde hair, that she ceremoniously drops into the mixture, the boiling flask explodes, pink bubblegum fluid rapidly forming itself into a vaguely human form, splitting at a rate that would make cancer throw a jealous fit. Blastula, gastrula, embryo, fetus, growing, aging, twenty-two years of a life cycle in thirty-seven seconds.
Lifting the knife, she pierces the hand of the newly formed clone, collecting blood in in another beaker, before pouring it over the Hellmouth's seal.
"ISHTAR, Queen of Night, Open thy gate to me!
ISHTAR, Lady of the Battle, Open wide Thy Gate!
ISHTAR, Sword of the people, Open thy Gate to me!"
Daisy's mind takes a momentary detour into crapinshortsville as three rays of light burst from the seal, each leg of the pentagram rising into the air, like a lazy caltrop-
"ISHTAR, Lady of he Gift of Love, Open wide Thy Gate!
Gate of the Gentle Planet, LIBAT, Open unto me!"
-and she finds herself roughly shunted into a small, passive corner of her mind, a not-quite out-of-body experience because she's still there, but her mouth begins moving of its own free will, making strange gurgling vowels, of which the majority involve repetitions of Ia, Ia, Ia, rolling endlessly from her lips.
"Ia Gushe-Ya! Ia Inanna! Ia Erninni-Ya!
Ashta Pa Mabacha Cha Kur Enni-Ya!"
A fully formed skeleton rises from the open seal, its crown decorated by a few decayed tufts of yellow hair with dark roots. The skull grins, socketless eyes glowing yellow as it swivels to Daisy.
"Rosenberg," it drawls, and really it shouldn't because, hello, no lungs. "Aww. You missed me, didn't you? I'd give you a great big kiss, but you know how eighty-year morning breath is."
Her lips move. Not her words spill out. "I'm here to release her."
"Of course you are." Hissing now. A big toothy smile. And Daisy keeps marvelling on how it speechifies sans throat. "Thing is, you can't free her without freeing me as well. You see, Miss Corporeal and I've got a little metaphysical connection here. The Big Bad and the Missus, we go together."
It begins singing and dear Whatever-Diety's-on-Duty-Today, it-it can't be. It's inhumane.
"Like ra-ma la-ma la-ma ka dinga kading-a-dong."
Nothing less than Evil in its purest form.
Daisy's lips curl up into a rictus, something between a coquettish look and a grin. "Oh. Well that’s okay." And the time for fun banter's over, as the chant starts up again.
"Rabbi Lo-Yak Zi Ishtari Anpa!
Inanna Zi Amma Kanpa!"
The smile widens, her left hand raising as more incoherent syllables rattle from her throat. Boy, if Daisy'd known she'd be taken over halfway through this, she wouldn't have bothered to learn all her lines.
A foggy substance drifts up from the skeleton, white phosphorus and water vapor wiggling in the air, entwined by a thick black smog. Spell-o incant-o, virtual wrassling as black peels away from the white, right hand fisting in the air, that curl of smoke pinned like an angry rattlesnake.
A negligent flick of Daisy's possessed left and white soul fog flies into the brand new shell.
"Bi Zamma Kanpa!
Ia Ia Be-Yi Razuluki!"
Her right, still fisted, twitches and jerks from the wildly bucking mass of black. Bringing her left hand back over, she sweeps it up under the right until it taps against palm. Black shoots back into the old Slayer, snapping like a rubber band.
Corporeal once more, the First blinks, shaking its skeletal head, looking around. There's Willow. And there's that creepy smile.
"You can keep the body." She snaps her fingers.
"Oh, shiiii...!" echoes in the hallways of hell as it falls through the open Hellmouth, right before it seals shut once again. Well sort of. Parts of the decayed mass don’t quite make it through in time, the results, a strangely satisfying crunch.
Then, silence. And she's back.
The whole thing can't have been more than a few minutes, even if Daisy's roaring migraine is insisting more along the lines of four weeks, and it's all a little too much, what with the Willow possession and big dead body and resurrection and...
Resurrection.
Holy shit.
"I did it! I did it! Eat your heart out, Mel! Who's the Willowite? Who's the Willowite?"
Behind her, the body twitches, inhales deeply, tremulously, as newborn eyes slither open.
A blurry gaze moves over to the girl. Willow, she almost blurts, but her throat doesn't quite work yet. Nothing quite works. And picture's just a little wrong. The larger nose, longer chin. The girl is a little too short, too many little things just different enough to be someone else. Besides, Willow never did the Superbowl Shuffle.
Neurons slowly return to her extremities. She feels her toes wiggle. Ten of them. There's a start. Fingers. All of them. Good, good.
"Oh yeah! Uh huh! Uh huh! Uh! Uh! Uh!"
By the time all feeling returns to her body, creaking muscles stretching and protesting their movement, Not-quite-Willow is still celebrating her victory dance. Though, apparently, she's moved on to the Cabbage Patch.
"Excuse me." A finger taps, none too gently, on Daisy's shoulder and she swivels, churning fists and all, to the drawn face of one naked, pissed-off clone. Her voice is hoarse and rusty from disuse, but the low, threat is all too apparent in the newly-resurrected grate of:
"What the hell is going on?"
Give me back my broken night,
My mirrored room, my secret life.
It's lonely here,
There's no one left to torture.
-Leonard Cohen
Part 1: Scorpio RisingBreathe in. Good. Now, out.
It's not a naturally conscious decision. Ordinarily, her medulla oblongata takes care of all autonomic things like the rhythm of her heart, peristalsis, and rate of hair growth before her bi-weekly application of RWR14 un-magically transforms all semblance of mousy, blah chestnut into dynamic red. Her brain is the most advanced ROM unit Mother Nature has ever created, all the necessary functions programmed in from the get go, freeing the bigger parts to occupy themselves with other activities. Such as gazing out at the shattered landscape zipping by at 225, as the ghost reflected in her window brushes a stray lock back over her right ear.
No doubt about it, Daisy Fitch is a true multitasking unit.
In. Out.
Still, focusing on breathing, controlling it, comforts her.
And at least, this way, she doesn’t have to think about the great big felony she's about to commit.
She imagins her diaphragm flattening like an accordion, the screaming little molecules of oxygen sucked in from the air, bouncing down her trachea like a waterslide, through her bronchial tubes, until they reach the little feathers of alveoli decorating the inside of her lungs. She focuses on her mental cartoon with pinpoint precision, wrapping herself in the image of her respiratory theme park.
Still, a little thumb (damn multitasking!) of worry presses into the middle of her brain like a permanent bad sector, and that part, instead of concentrating on her breathing mini-drama wonders if she's injected herself with enough muscle relaxant.
In. Out. (Ingredients. Yup.)
In. Out. (Necessaary supplies. Confirmed.)
In. Out. (Gotta pee.)
In. Out. (What if she gets caught and tossed out into the Lip with a ham sandwich and butter knife, forced to live out the remaining the fifteen seconds of her lifespan as demon hors d'oeuvres? Would it at least have mayo on it?)
In. Out. In. Out. In-
First order of business: stop hyperventilating. Otherwise she's going to pass out before even hitting Sunnydale.
Out, then. Hold.
Because the last thing she wants to do is disappoint the Goddess in her mind.
Oh dear. It sounds better when she doesn't quite put it that way.
After all, it started out innocently enough. In dreams. The whisper of a voice. A suggestion. Sometimes a nudge. Then, it began encroaching, in daydreams, idle thoughts, full consciousness.
And now Willow tells her she's the one. She's going to be famous. Promises she'll be witness to the most spectacular event ever since the whole Christ-on-the-third-day deal. Because Who'da really think of her, Daisy Fitch, as worthy of bearing Rosenberg's voice?
All she has to do is raise the dead.
Naturally, how can she say no to that?
Of course, she could very well just be insane, what with the hearing voices in her head and all. Wouldn’t it be funny? Yeah, it’d be nice to be insane, to chalk it all up to delusion, turn around and check herself into a Thorazine farm.
Because, otherwise? Scared shitless.
The Bullet lurches to a halt at Ventura 170th, final stop west. From there, the track dissolves into rubble and twisted strands of metal. On the east bank, a row of taxicabs stretch from end to end.
Taking a deep breath, Daisy steps out to the streets.
Ambitious is the last word Dante would use to describe himself. In fact, if you ask him, he'll admit to being the nobody blip, an embarrassing anomaly, the little acorn that couldn't, kicked and buried somewhere far away from the oak of his oversized family tree. He's supposed to be a builder; after all, it's in his genes. His father is an architect, one uncle, a civil engineer, and yet another, a security specialist. Their fathers before them had been builders as well. (His grandfather, however, had been an accountant, which might have been due to influence from his great-grandmother's side of the family.) Still, like the four generations of men in his family, it's almost a given fact.
Except for him.
But then again, he's no Xander Harris. He has no such ambitions. He can't fake any more interest in building the better engine or making giant people habitrails more impenetrable and imposing. No, there are no foundations and iron rebars and redesigning Frank Gehry's for him. He’s more Gen-X than Gen-17.
Instead, he drives a taxi.
Behind the wheel of his '27 300DT, fingers drum restlessly against the molded plastic steering wheel. One million plus miles and still going strong, burning vegetable oil, alcohol, diesel, whatever. The engine is on its third rebuild, the tranny, number five, but the classic Mercedes logo, pretty little decorative ornament, is still attached to the hood. It should have been retired a century ago because there are about a million cars that are a lot faster, all fiberglass and aluminum, thirty-eight-hundred horsepowered demons, but not the Tank. It's his baby, his pride and joy. And so what if he passenger seat's missing a few springs and tilts uncomfortably forward? If the power windows only work on his side or the left rear door is permanently stuck shut? Or that it takes twenty-two seconds for the Tank to go from zero to 140? Not every cab totes around two tons of ceraluminum armor either.
Other drivers got you where you need to go quick.
Dante Harris guarantees survival.
So, when the girl slides into the back seat of his ride, and says “Sunnydale High," in a nervous, but polite way, he only pushes the flag down with a nod and a grin.
Observing her through the rearview mirror, he notes she's cute. Very Willow. Which means she probably only wants to be your friend. Ah, well.
The glow-plug light flickers on. With a manly (as described by him) rumble, the engine turns over, and the car slowly pulls back and rolls away from the curb.
He walks softly, makes no footsteps, no sounds save a steady, metallic click, tapping lightly on the ground, a metronome edging closer. And he carries a big stick. His left leg is a half-inch shorter than the right, and with his weight leaning into the latter, he obviously favors it.
He strolls with deliberate, languid limps towards the group that includes, roughly a dozen vampires and their hired gun - some eight-foot mutated menagerie of assorted parts. Hooves for feet. Gorilla arms. Bat wings and a face that resembles the wrong end of a giant squid. Peering into the shadows, the hit-thing looks about as mortified as a creature without any discernable facial features or lips can appear.
"You gotta be shitting me," comes the burble. "Him. Cripple guy. He's the one killing allaya off?"
Feet shuffling. Embarassed mutters. One or two whiny protests. And the clicking comes closer, until Limpy stops and looks up into the waxy, misshapen blobular orifice of the Ezbekiyeh.
"So you're Angel," comes the grunt, as he takes in the serious, dark-haired vampire. "Huh. You're a lot smaller than I thought you'd be."
Angel glances around, unfazed, assessing his surroundings, and the vampires eyeing him with alternating fear and awe. "Well, I'd have to say you're a lot...no, you're pretty much every bit as ugly as I'd imagined."
There's a snort, wet and bubbly, of the snot-filled variety. "Big words from a little shrimp." Features stretch out to what might be considered a magnanimous smile. "Tell you what. I'll give you a head start, pop you from the back. You won't feel a thing." Then leans back to his cohorts, snickering. "Knew he was nothin' but a-"
From the end of the staff, a curved blade snaps out, red in the moonlight, and two swings later, faster than any of the thugs could anticipate, the Ezbekiyeh finds himself staring at his hooves and torso from the three neat pieces of him splattered on the ground.
He flips the blade and four heads separate from their shoulders, the microscopic line severing the spinal cord between the third and fourth cervical bones with surgical precision. Their bodies are dust before the heads hit the floor, courtesy of the blood-red blade.
Normally, blood is simply another impurity in a folded blade. The mixture of carbon, iron and calcium renders the steel brittle and susceptible to breaking. Unless, of course, you're a tengu. The forge of the naginata comes from a long tradition of demon weaponsmiths. It's strong because blood makes it stronger. And it's wicked sharp. He found that one out years ago when its former owner popped his left patella like a microwaved marshmallow.
The others, being natural-(re)born cowards, smartly enough, bail in all sorts of different directions. He chucks the naginata at the slowest one, pinning her through her heart, face-first against the side of a dilapidated building. Her squeals and struggles magnify as he limps painfully nearer. With a hand firmly against the back of her neck, he draws the blade out, the slurping sound echoed by her screams. Shoving the vamp to the ground, he lifts the blade.
And pauses.
This one strikes a strange frisson of familarity in him. Small. Blonde. Cute. Covered in blood. Reminds him of her.
Which is odd because he can't really picture her face anymore, can't resolve the fuzzy lines and colors. He hasn't dreamed about her in years, only remembers that a few decades past, one of her copies had stumbled into the Hyperion, hysterical and clawing at her head. Cellular imprinting. Compulsion. Something. Drawing her to that place.
His features harden. A flick of the wrist, and she scatters in the wind, along with the other debris floating about.
The girl. The copy. She'd muttered incoherently, gibbered and cried pitifully, and all he could do was cradle her in his arms, this blank and terrible creature, before she finally died. And yet. Still has trouble remembering. What she smelled like. How she felt. Her exact features, an unfocused blur.
There are too many holes, too much fuzz in his memories. He thinks he might just be getting old. A few centuries will do that do you.
Sometimes, though, he feels might have been a different creature altogether. Another man. Another vampire. Another lifetime.
Demon. The choice. Claws in his brain.
But that might just be wishful thinking.
He's smarter than the average undead. More tenacious. Centuries of experience and Slayer blood in his veins have helped him wage the endless battles on the rubbled streets in the Hellmouth.
Like the line of now-extinct Slayers, he's the last, the only one left of his kind. And like them, he knows, in the end, it's all futile, and that one day he'll slip, he'll be distracted, and then it'll all be over; all the overtime he's managed to buy for those he's promised to protect traded in for a pile of dust.
He knows he's going to fail. Tomorrow. Next week. Next year or decade or centiry. Inevitable, really. Because he failed so long ago. He loved. He obsessed. And because of that, he destroyed her. And he can never take it back, never make up for the damage he's caused, the path of carnage he's strewn everywhere he's gone. And he has no excuse. He's the monster, the murderer. Thief. Rapist.
Still, he fights on, driven with fanatical fury to protect whomever he can. Day by day. Forever and ever.
It's all he can do.
Sometimes she dreams. Other times, she has visions. For her though, they all merge into a thick, warm stew that often speaks, and less often screams. And when they scream, she does as well. Gibbering and clawing and crying, she wonders where he vanished to.
Spike? Spike? Where did her beautiful boy go? Sometimes, she thinks she sees him, but then it's Daddy. Daddy bending over, picking her up, comforting her, wrapping her arms. Daddy, who speaks to her with his sad, broken soul.
Riddles and vision, tiny broken pieces of crystal figurines and sparkly jewels and little girls' hearts. Evil, they whisper. Evil visions for evil girls. And, oh, how she's been evil.
"Do you dream?" she murmurs, humming tonelessly into the handset. "I see them, snakes and stars, shaking and stirring, drunken skies dropping souls. Drop, drop, drop..."
"Drusilla," Wesley Wyndham Price gently lifts the receiver from her grip. "I've told you. I'll answer the phone." Holding open the patio door, he gestures for her to follow him back into the Hyperion lobby.
"But the stars..." she pouts, her voice a petulant purr. "They still move about."
"And they'll be out again tomorrow, I promise."
"They told me a story tonight." She smiles, as if privy to some private joke. "A rhyme about daddy."
"What did they say?"
She turns to him, Drusilla, so very serious.
"Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn, apple seed and apple thorn;"
Without hesitation, he adds, "Wire, briar, limber lock, three geese in a flock," before giving her a rueful look. "I know the rest of the rhyme."
"Pretty, isn't it? A pretty rhyme for my pretty cuckoo."
She forgets sometimes, who she is, where she is, who she used to be.
Wesley's hand is still out, palm up, waiting. She pauses, cocking her head at the offering, as if inspecting some rare bird. Slowly, cellular memory returning, she rests her hand in his. It's cool, smooth, without temperature, like hers, and he smells of lightning and sulfur, thunderstorms underneath. As he leads her inside, a milky white film slicks over her eyes, and she turns back, tilting her head to glance once more at the black sky.
"One flew east, and one flew west...and Scorpio...Scorpio rises on the horizon."
Hallway after endless hallway. How the hell can one lousy high school have so many damn hallways? Festooned with ick in a variety of shades and colors, it smells worse than it looks and that says a lot; the manky stench of urine and decay and...pretzels...thick in the air, seventy-eight years of accumulated shit. Creepy shadows flicker from the gas lamp in her hands, making her jump at every encroaching shade, though realistically, it's probably been long abandoned by anything human. Or inhuman, for the matter. After all, even the most pathetic creatures of the night have minimal standards.
Through the tour of nightmarish corridors, down endless flights of steps, Daisy heroicially ploughs through the sights and smells and sticky, squishy things under her shoes that she doesn't even want to think about. No, far easier to listen to happy, chirpy voice in head and not think too much or else she'll run, screaming back down the halls, and probably pitch mug-down into something completely repulsive.
Here.
Finally.
Hello, giant manhole of evil.
Gingerly setting the lamp on the ground, Daisy carefully scratches out each leg of the pentacle into the dirt. In the middle, she places an antique dragonfly stove. When the gas pops to life, she sets a beaker down, sloshing chemicals and herbs together into a concoction that resembles nothing more than pink bubblegum, torquing the fuel line as the mixture bubble, bubbles and all that jazz
"By the Name which I was given on the Sphere of NEBO, I call to thee
Lady, Queen of Harlots and of Soldiers, I call to thee"
Words sound strange, stumbling from her tongue, as she mouths the incantation she'd practiced so hard for so long, she can practically recite it unconscious.
Lady, Mistress of Battle and of Love, I pray Thee, Remember
Deity of Men! Goddess of Women! Where thou gazest, the Dead live!"
Which is good for her, because as she pulls the final ingredient out - a strand of fine, blonde hair, that she ceremoniously drops into the mixture, the boiling flask explodes, pink bubblegum fluid rapidly forming itself into a vaguely human form, splitting at a rate that would make cancer throw a jealous fit. Blastula, gastrula, embryo, fetus, growing, aging, twenty-two years of a life cycle in thirty-seven seconds.
Lifting the knife, she pierces the hand of the newly formed clone, collecting blood in in another beaker, before pouring it over the Hellmouth's seal.
"ISHTAR, Queen of Night, Open thy gate to me!
ISHTAR, Lady of the Battle, Open wide Thy Gate!
ISHTAR, Sword of the people, Open thy Gate to me!"
Daisy's mind takes a momentary detour into crapinshortsville as three rays of light burst from the seal, each leg of the pentagram rising into the air, like a lazy caltrop-
"ISHTAR, Lady of he Gift of Love, Open wide Thy Gate!
Gate of the Gentle Planet, LIBAT, Open unto me!"
-and she finds herself roughly shunted into a small, passive corner of her mind, a not-quite out-of-body experience because she's still there, but her mouth begins moving of its own free will, making strange gurgling vowels, of which the majority involve repetitions of Ia, Ia, Ia, rolling endlessly from her lips.
"Ia Gushe-Ya! Ia Inanna! Ia Erninni-Ya!
Ashta Pa Mabacha Cha Kur Enni-Ya!"
A fully formed skeleton rises from the open seal, its crown decorated by a few decayed tufts of yellow hair with dark roots. The skull grins, socketless eyes glowing yellow as it swivels to Daisy.
"Rosenberg," it drawls, and really it shouldn't because, hello, no lungs. "Aww. You missed me, didn't you? I'd give you a great big kiss, but you know how eighty-year morning breath is."
Her lips move. Not her words spill out. "I'm here to release her."
"Of course you are." Hissing now. A big toothy smile. And Daisy keeps marvelling on how it speechifies sans throat. "Thing is, you can't free her without freeing me as well. You see, Miss Corporeal and I've got a little metaphysical connection here. The Big Bad and the Missus, we go together."
It begins singing and dear Whatever-Diety's-on-Duty-Today, it-it can't be. It's inhumane.
"Like ra-ma la-ma la-ma ka dinga kading-a-dong."
Nothing less than Evil in its purest form.
Daisy's lips curl up into a rictus, something between a coquettish look and a grin. "Oh. Well that’s okay." And the time for fun banter's over, as the chant starts up again.
"Rabbi Lo-Yak Zi Ishtari Anpa!
Inanna Zi Amma Kanpa!"
The smile widens, her left hand raising as more incoherent syllables rattle from her throat. Boy, if Daisy'd known she'd be taken over halfway through this, she wouldn't have bothered to learn all her lines.
A foggy substance drifts up from the skeleton, white phosphorus and water vapor wiggling in the air, entwined by a thick black smog. Spell-o incant-o, virtual wrassling as black peels away from the white, right hand fisting in the air, that curl of smoke pinned like an angry rattlesnake.
A negligent flick of Daisy's possessed left and white soul fog flies into the brand new shell.
"Bi Zamma Kanpa!
Ia Ia Be-Yi Razuluki!"
Her right, still fisted, twitches and jerks from the wildly bucking mass of black. Bringing her left hand back over, she sweeps it up under the right until it taps against palm. Black shoots back into the old Slayer, snapping like a rubber band.
Corporeal once more, the First blinks, shaking its skeletal head, looking around. There's Willow. And there's that creepy smile.
"You can keep the body." She snaps her fingers.
"Oh, shiiii...!" echoes in the hallways of hell as it falls through the open Hellmouth, right before it seals shut once again. Well sort of. Parts of the decayed mass don’t quite make it through in time, the results, a strangely satisfying crunch.
Then, silence. And she's back.
The whole thing can't have been more than a few minutes, even if Daisy's roaring migraine is insisting more along the lines of four weeks, and it's all a little too much, what with the Willow possession and big dead body and resurrection and...
Resurrection.
Holy shit.
"I did it! I did it! Eat your heart out, Mel! Who's the Willowite? Who's the Willowite?"
Behind her, the body twitches, inhales deeply, tremulously, as newborn eyes slither open.
A blurry gaze moves over to the girl. Willow, she almost blurts, but her throat doesn't quite work yet. Nothing quite works. And picture's just a little wrong. The larger nose, longer chin. The girl is a little too short, too many little things just different enough to be someone else. Besides, Willow never did the Superbowl Shuffle.
Neurons slowly return to her extremities. She feels her toes wiggle. Ten of them. There's a start. Fingers. All of them. Good, good.
"Oh yeah! Uh huh! Uh huh! Uh! Uh! Uh!"
By the time all feeling returns to her body, creaking muscles stretching and protesting their movement, Not-quite-Willow is still celebrating her victory dance. Though, apparently, she's moved on to the Cabbage Patch.
"Excuse me." A finger taps, none too gently, on Daisy's shoulder and she swivels, churning fists and all, to the drawn face of one naked, pissed-off clone. Her voice is hoarse and rusty from disuse, but the low, threat is all too apparent in the newly-resurrected grate of:
"What the hell is going on?"